Propaganda videos fuel nightmares for families of Israeli hostages

Beyond the horizon of every hostage photograph is a family that hasn’t given up, a friend holding vigil, a community urging strength against a background of unimaginable loss and sadness.

Hope. That is all they have. Without it the darkness would win, the horror of the past months would engulf them, and so Michal Keshet and her family think of their loved ones held captive by Hamas, and they hope.

“Hope is strength,’’ said the Sydney woman whose 34-year-old nephew Yarden Bibas, his wife Shiri, 32, and two boys Ariel 4, and Kfir, then nine months, the youngest of all the hostages, were abducted from their home in ­Kibbutz Nir Oz on the morning of October 7.

“Hope is the only thing we have. Without it we would be really…’’ Her voice trails off because some things don’t have words.

Beyond the horizon of every hostage photograph is a family that hasn’t given up, a friend holding vigil, a community urging strength against a background of unimaginable loss and sadness.

As they prepare this weekend to mark 100 days since their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, siblings and loved ones were captured during the Hamas terrorist attacks on southern Israel, families stand united with a single message: we won’t give up.

They shout it from the Gaza border, loudspeakers in hand to help penetrate the maze of tunnels where hostages are believed to be held. “We won’t stop until you’re back home,’’ they yell.

They gather in the Tel Aviv civic space now known as Hostage Square. They meet politicians, do interviews, print flyers and T-shirts, update social media pages, set up family war rooms to glean scraps of information.

There is no complete audit of the murderous rampage of October 7 when about 1200 people were killed and an estimated 240 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.

More than 100 are still thought to be held but their status is uncertain. Many families of the missing don’t know if their loved one is dead or alive – they’ve spent 100 days suspended in time. Hopes were raised when 105 prisoners, mostly women and children, were released during the seven-day ceasefire late last year, and crushed when negotiations broke down.

Like many others, Yarden Bibas’s family’s strength has been cruelly tested by Hamas’ macabre games.

Ms Keshet cannot bear to watch a propaganda video released of Yarden, apparently filmed as he was informed his wife and babies were dead in Gaza. For this deeply loving father, it was too much. This big, healthy, happy bear of a man now appeared so wasted, so distressed; the video was a type of torture for his family, Ms Keshet said.

Israeli authorities haven’t verified Hamas claims that Shiri and the children were killed in an Israeli air strike and so the family keep hoping, just as they did in the face of earlier claims that the trio had been handed over to another Palestinian militant group.

“Our emotions have been played with in the most horrific ways over the past 100 days,’’ Ms Keshet said. “I don’t know how any human can do that. They’re not human, they’re just monsters.’

The propaganda videos are the worst. They provide proof of life and feed the worst of nightmares.

In the days following October 7, Yarden’s family saw videos of Shiri, terror and confusion in her eyes, cradling her two red-headed babies while surrounded by shouting fighters. A separate video showed Yarden being led away with blood gushing from his head from an apparent hammer blow.

Mother-of-four Ayelet Levy Shachar knows the anguish that comes with these sorts of images. She wrote recently of the widely viewed footage of her daughter being captured. “You have seen the video of my daughter Naama Levy. Everyone has,’’ she said.

“You have seen her dragged by her long brown hair from the back of a Jeep at gunpoint, somewhere in Gaza, her grey sweatpants covered in blood.

“You may have perhaps noticed that her ankles are cut, that she’s barefoot and limping. She is seriously injured. She is frightened. And I, her mother, am helpless in these moments of horror.”

That one video doesn’t represent the life of this sunny 19-year-old who’d always believed in the good of humanity. “I pray that that image, and the experience of what that image represents, of fear and pain, isn’t how she comes to see the world,’’ her mother said.

For Naama’s Sydney-based cousin Zack Shachar the fear and uncertainty of the past 100 days are unlike anything he has experienced.

Released hostages reported that they had seen Naama in Gaza, that she was wounded but could walk and talk. Since those reports, some 50 days ago, they’ve heard no more.

“Think about your daughter or granddaughter for one hour in the hands of these people. Now think about 100 days

“For us it’s a nightmare. We don’t know when she is going to be released or what her conditions are; the hostages that came back told very difficult stories.”

Like Michal Keshet and her family, he tries to cling to hope, and to a plan he made with family in Israel. “We made a promise that they will come to visit us with Naama once she is released. I hope that will happen.”

For Nikki Perzuck, another of Naama’s cousins in faraway Australia, the horror is tinged with shock that too few have responded vehemently to the mass kidnappings. “You would have thought that the whole world would have stopped and said ‘We can’t believe what’s going on.’ There was a little bit of that, and then it just changed very quickly,” she says.

“In other atrocities that have happened to women, all these women’s organisations speak up. Where is the voice for these people who have been kidnapped?”  There are particular fears for the young women still being held.

“They range in age from 18 to 26,’’ Naama’s mother said. “I think of what they, and my Naama, could be subjected to at every ­moment of every day. Each minute is an eternity in hell.’’

Over the past 100 days, Galia Hartman has experienced a lifetime of emotions. What began with an uncertain silence as she and her husband Ronen tried to contact his family in southern Israel on 7 October culminated with the news that 10 relatives had either been murdered or kidnapped.

Amid the mayhem, a small miracle: Ronen’s mother Ruth, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, was saved after hiding for 30 hours at the now decimated Kibbutz Be’eri.

In the intervening months, the Melbourne-based Hartmans experienced an even more bewildering array of reactions, from grief for the dead to fear for seven family members, the youngest aged just 3, taken hostage, to joy when six were freed in November.

This included the Hartman’s niece Adi, whose husband Tal Shoham, 38, remains hostage.

“It was on one hand a huge relief, a miracle. Six returned, but one is still there, so the family is not complete,” said Ms Hartman, who has just returned to Australia from Israel after the protracted process of burying three murdered relatives, including Ronen’s beloved brother Avshalom Haran.

“We just want Tal to come back so the family will be complete with the people that are still alive. You can’t start working on the future if Tal is still there.”

Her sentiments are felt across swathes of people whose family members and friends remain captive all these months on. “Every day that they are not freed, the chances for them to be still alive is deteriorating,” says Kibbutz Be’eri resident Hana Brin, who is still waiting for seven members of her decimated community to be released. “We are worried for their lives.”

Medical student Shay Dickmann understands this only too well. Her 39-year-old cousin Carmel Gat, an occupational therapist, was kidnapped while on a family visit to Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. Carmel’s mother Kinneret was murdered and her brother Alon, his wife Yarden and their three-year-old daughter Geffen were also abducted.

On the drive to Gaza the trio managed to escape under gunfire but Yarden was recaptured while Alon and little Geffen hid in a ditch for more than eight hours before making their way to safety.

For 54 days Yarden was kept under Hamas guard in a house in Gaza before she was released in November and reunited with her husband and daughter. Carmel, however, remains in captivity and the family’s focus is on getting her out. “We wake up every morning with huge hope that today will be the day … we are desperately worried about her,’’ Shay told The Weekend Australian.

She lists her worries for her cousin. “There are so many of them. I’m afraid that she’s hungry. I’m afraid that she’s cold, that someone is hurting her physically, touching her. I’m afraid that she has lost hope, she doesn’t know who from her family is still alive. I’m really afraid that she thinks we have all forgotten about her. She doesn’t know that the world now knows about her and wants her to be released.’’

Her family took heart from news from released hostages that Carmel had been giving other prisoners strength, practising yoga and meditating with them. She was keeping a diary to count the days. “This was the first sign of life from Carmel but also a sign that Carmel is choosing life, she’s using her control over the only thing that is left when freedom is taken, the control of her mind,’’ Shay said

But that information was nearly two months ago. Like others, they wait for updates.

Michal Keshet says that in the absence of any proof confirming the fate of Shiri and her two children, her family have hope even as they worry over her nephew Yarden’s psychological state.

“We believe, we want to believe and we have to believe that they are safe somewhere in there,’’ she said from Israel, where she visited over the summer holidays, cradling a dream that Yarden, Shiri and the boys would be reunited and freed while she was there.

She says that if Kfir is not released in the next few days he will spend his first birthday, January 18, in captivity.

“I want to know that they’ll be home soon, and that everybody’s doing everything in their power, not just Israel but people with influence in the world, to release all the hostages,’’ she said.

“If the world stands behind us, not just feeling sorry for us but taking action … I hope that it will put the right pressure on these monsters to release the hostages. They need to come home now.”